Something in me broke loose. A traitorous tear escaped, leaving a hot trail on my cheek.
She caught it with her lips.
For a long moment, I could not breathe. I wrapped my arms around her and held her against me. I needed this more than air. The noise in my mind—the fear, the guilt, the war—dimmed to something bearable.
She rested her forehead to mine, breath warm. “Cristian,” she whispered, “what do you want to come out of all this?”
The question hollowed me out.
“Freedom,” I said. “Gold. Justice.”
She pulled back enough to search my face. “In that order?”
“Today, yes.”
Her hand slipped to my jaw, grounding. “Where do I fit?”
The bond moved inside me. I met her gaze, choosing my words with precision. Truth mattered.
“Next to me,” I said. “Or I fail.”
She nodded once, slow and certain, and tucked herself closer against me. I wrapped my arms around her again, holding her as if she were the sole point of gravity in a world designed to pull me apart.
She stayed. And I did not let go.
Not yet.
Not until I had to.
I needed silence. Not the soft, domestic kind Nadia filled the house with—her hums, her clinking of cups, her heartbeat faint and constant through the walls—but the kind that stripped a man down to nothing but purpose.
The basement was the only place left in this wretched century with any semblance of quiet and aloneness.
I shrugged off my shirt and let the still air wrap around me. The space smelled of dust, metal, and old earth. Nadia had told me it was a “storage area.” She was right. Now it stored my frustration.
I began with the punching bag—leather, suspended from a chain, a luxury I’d found in the corner weeks ago. I struck it once. Hard. The chain screamed.
Again.
Again.
The rhythm came easily. My body remembered this language—violence without malice, movement for the sake of survival. It steadied me when nothing else could.
But today, even that discipline frayed. My mind would not empty.
Every thought was of Nadia.
Her laugh. The curl of her hair when it slipped free of its pins. The warmth of her skin when she brushed past me and pretended it meant nothing. The way her energy always reached for mine even when she was trying to keep her distance.
I punched harder.
The chain snapped once, then caught again. I felt the vibration up my arm like a warning. The air around me shuddered with the force of the blow.
She was deteriorating.
No—fading.
But I couldn’t tell her. I didn’t want her to panic. I couldn’t afford the luxury of breaking down, or letting the fear that lived in my bones push through until it became the only thing I could feel.
